Hume (1987) believed that it is possible to identify certain judges as having especially reliable taste and then to take their subjective responses to objects as a standard in evaluating the objects. When such judges deliver what Hume called "a joint verdict," meaning, presumably, that they concur in taking pleasure in an object, taking pleasure in the object is then established as correct, in a sense, with at least customary probability, and any judge who fails to realize this pleasure is defective in his taste.
Kant, in contrast, thought that no corroboration of one's judgment is possible because a concurrence with or difference from the responses of other judges is logically irrelevant.
The idea of something explicitly called an aesthetic judgment seems first to have appeared in the eighteenth century and was formulated in detail by Kant (2000). By "aesthetic judgment" Kant meant a judgment based on a feeling. He was especially concerned to describe those feeling-based judgments in which an object is found beautiful, and then to show that we are entitled to make such judgments despite being unable to verify them. In his conviction that these judgments are essentially subjective (that is, derived from or based on the subject's feeling), Kant is in line with an earlier tradition.
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